I don’t know how many different people mentioned John Kessel to me before I ever read his work. Well, actually, that’s a lie. I know exactly how many people mentioned John Kessel: four. One of them was Gavin Grant and another was James Patrick Kelly. Mariel Morales and Taylor Preston, school friends of mine from the Stonecoast M.F.A. program, round out the list. In a weirder than fiction moment, while I’m currently typing up this blog post in Massachusetts, tomorrow John, Taylor, Mariel and I are having lunch in North Carolina. It feels like Jim and Kelly should be there as well.

Both this podcast and the next one are all about John Kessel’s fiction. Once you’ve read or listened to one of John’s stories, you’ll find yourself needing more, at least I did. One of my personal Kessel favorites is “Every Angel is Terrifying” along with his series of science fiction stories “A Lunar Quartet.”

It’s nice when it’s easy to share what you love. John’s collection The Baum Plan for Financial Independence is available as a free ebook on Weightless Books. So listen, enjoy and then download the rest of John’s stories and read them for yourself. I promise you won’t be disappointed.

Episode 9: In which Michael J. DeLuca reads John Kessel’s “The Last American.”